Microsoft Patent Application Hints at Multiple Versions of Future Xbox

  • Microsoft has filed a patent application that suggests the company “may be looking to release its next Xbox in multiple configurations, each with varying hardware power and capabilities,” according to Ars Technica.
  • The patent is for “Scalable Multimedia Computer System Architecture With QOS [Quality Of Service] Guarantees,” and describes a design for a system capable of “allowing platform services to scale over time.”
  • “Those ‘platform services’ include pretty much everything the hardware does besides directly running games — everything from maintaining the basic operating system, handling network traffic, and interpreting inputs to potentially streaming content to nearby tablets or recording TV shows,” explains the article.
  • The company is calling this a new “communication fabric” framework that “would let the system allocate computing resources more flexibly between platform and application tasks concurrently, while also ensuring that the game-playing portion doesn’t dip below a certain quality threshold,” notes Ars Technica.
  • This would allow Microsoft to develop multiple hardware configurations of the same basic system, that allow for additional platform features.
  • Additional platform services might help convert the game console into a general purpose computer capable of running an operating system like Windows, accessing the Internet via a browser, and offering audiovisual applications, word processing and more.

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